Praying to Our Lady of the Bathroom Tile

When we met with our kitchen designer for the first time and talked about timing, he quoted us a lengthy 5 months.  After seeing, what I assume was shock and/or dismay on our faces, he amended his estimate to a breezy 3-4 months if we could "be the kind of people who can make decisions quickly."  Without a mote of hesitation we blurted out a big, fat, concerted "YES."

Of course we could be those people.  I mean.... right?

[The password is: Wrong.]

Let me clarify by taking some ownership here - it's really my paralyzing fear of making an important decision that's been at play the last several weeks. 

Turns out that picking out tiles for not one but TWO bathrooms was painful enough to warrant a namechange of this blog to Bathroom Nightmares.  At first, we had to work with a really annoying people like the quasi-guido who kept trying to sell us "sharp" tiles (as in they look 'real sharp', they were not actually broken into dangerous shards), amongst other "helpful" goons at various stores.

Look how helpful they were!

Filed under SHARP: For if you ever wanted to experience showering in 8-bit.

Filed under SHARP: "You can always mix and match tiles for a totally unique and modern look!"

Filed under SHARP: "Murals are real popular right now."

I thought tiles would be the hard part (it was), but I'ma tell you- trying to then find and decide on the fricken vanities and all the whatnots and whathaveyous that go into every bathroom... man alive. We needed divine intervention.

We needed.......... Evan.

Evan is one of the head honchos over at Stone Source - an amazing stone and tile distributor in NYC. He is THE stone guy. Even his name 'Evan' means stone in Hebrew. I don't know why we didn't go to him from the start... probably assuming he was a million miles out of our price range, but turns out he has amazingly lovely tiles that are entirely affordable!

It's taken roughly 1 month, 8 salespeople, and 2 souls, but we have at long-last put together our tile and vanity selections for each of the bathrooms.

"Large" (SIC) bathroom:

Lovely retro beveled-edge tile for around the tub

Freestanding wall-mount vanity in wenge

Taupe "wood" porcelain tile for the floor

Orange you glad I didn't pick another color for the walls?

It's a mix between neutral, loud, retro, and modern. I'm really hoping this pulls together as nicely as it does in my head... here's to hoping!

And for the small bathroom:

The gorgeous ceramic shower tiles! Thanks, Evan!

Retro-tastic white penny rounds for the floor with dark grey grout

Simple neo-angle shower to save on non-existant square footage in this itty-bitty master bath

Teeny freestanding vanity in grey oak

A warm and happy yellow for the wall!

So there they are!  What do you think?  Am I completely out my mind with my color and texture combinations? The jury will be out for the next 4 weeks 'til completion.

Speaking of- next up... CONSTRUCTION HAS BEGUN!

Turning the proverbial corner.

As previously discussed, we HAVE actually been making some progress over here in Houseville.  It's not the type of work that's been particularly exciting, but it's been not only necessary but entirely positive.

Over the past many many many many months we have been slowly clearing out closets, drawers, rooms.  In the beginning, it was painfully difficult to make decisions on what could be gotten rid of, but as more and more time passes, the "keep" piles slowly have been dwindling as the truly important things become increasingly more apparent.

Some highlights of the cleanout include:

• Multiple scheduled pickups, missed days of work, and sheer determination finally resulted in a triumphant haulaway by the Salvation Army of tons of furniture, clothes, lamps, and roughly 4,331 plates, cups, glasses, and cutlery items
• Finding a new home for the good china
• Saying goodbye to dad's (and my) entire music collection - don't worry, every single album was ripped before bidding it adieu

Here's a summary of some of our progress and a few before and afters:

Dining room before...

"If found, please return to...."  Actually, no. Don't.

All the china was donated to a pair of young lovers we know who have been making use of 4 plastic plates for the past year. We hope they'll make good use of their new [non-plastic] ones.

A small portion of the glassware we had to pack up for the pickup.

Wrapping a million delicate things in newspaper is dirty work.

Cleaned out and ready for pickup!

Hello! Hello... hello... Echo! Echo... echo...

 

Buh-bye stuff!

Stacks of CDs ready to go!

Our good friend Dom valiantly came to the rescue of ALL these CDs!

So, after a lengthy standstill we finally made some measurable progress and really felt like things were looking up.  To honor this shift in outlook, we decided to nix the negativity of the blog title and transform this blog into a record of the ongoing metamorphosis of this home: No. 92!

Sure there will be nightmares (the first of which you'll be hearing about shortly) but in the end, it's going to be a happy tale.

TCB! Or something...

So, I just noticed that the entire month of March has come and gone since the last post.  Must mean we've been busy, right?  Well, sorta.

For starters, there's been a huge shift in gears since February.  We finally signed on with a kitchen designer.  A real, honest-to-god, bona fide (and certified!) kitchen designer.  He even has initials after his name, as all real professionals do: CKD. Stands for - you guessed it - Certified Kitchen Designer.  Shocker.  But apparently it takes TIME to design a kitchen-- especially when we have really kooky specific taste and requests.  Oh and also- our house is really not conducive to (ahem) housing the kitchen we most desire.  So in the meantime we wait.

And then waiting becomes thinking becomes planning becomes doing! And we decided to just go ahead with this little side project of ours called Redoing the Bathroom Upstairs and Building a Bathroom Where A Bathroom Never Existed Before IN the Master Bedroom.  What?

Well, we kicked off the project with a local father-son contractor team and it looks as if this Friday will be the official start of demolition!  Yippee!!

Just for fun, here are a few pix of the existing bathroom and the space where the new bathroom will go.  The mind reels, right?

The blue and yellow concept here just screams 50s retro... but not in the good way.

It's a hot tub time machine!  Next stop: yesteryear!

One of these things is not like the other.... Although mad props on the built-in toothbrush and soap holders!

 

Small alcove of our bedroom. Yes, a bathroom is going to be there.

Every contractor/architect/design person who has seen this vanity my parents installed when they bought the house suffered from an acute case of WTFISTHISDOINGHEREISM. We couldn't help.

So that's where we are for now.  Up next: the exciting saga of The Great Emptying of the House.  Stay tuned.